Thursday, December 2, 2010

In my last blog post, I presented you with 24 ideas for Openbravo Workspace Widgets but I have to admit that these images were a bit of a tease, using smoke & mirrors in Photoshop. So now let´s put the money where our mouth is and build them for real with the step-by-step guide below that shows you how to create a simple widget for the Openbravo Workspace.

Before you start, make sure you are running Openbravo 3.0 - RC3 (release notes here) in Firefox and that your are logged in as a System Administrator.

You will be able to build your own widget in less than 5 minutes and share them with your team. If you also want to register and publish your widgets as a module, see Appendix II in the guide.

Share your experiences on the UX Labs forum. Here you will also find some source URLs for a number of widgets: Calendar, Motion Chart, Google Insights & Google Docs. Just copy & paste this in your widget definition. Add yours if you find some nice ones.

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

With Release Candidate 3 (RC3) we are one step closer to delivering the promise of Openbravo 3.0. In this blog post I want to focus on the most important change in RC3: Fully functional Workspace Widgets. I will give you 24 examples of all the cool things you can do with them.

In RC1 and RC2 the MyOpenbravo tab (from now on called: Workspace) already featured a set of static "fake" widgets that served as a preview of the real thing. In RC3, we have rebuilt them as components that are defined in the Application Dictionary and can be packaged as modules. This means that from now on you can start designing, developing and deploying widgets and share them with your team, company or the world. We will get you started with a set of out-of-the-box widgets but the real interesting ones will be developed by our community. Although our audience is different and smaller in volume than that for the iPhone or Android App Stores, I can´t help believing in a similar burst of creativity for our Openbravo Workspace Widgets. Everybody to whom I explained the concept of Workspace Widgets in the last months, instantly came up with amazing ideas, whether they be productivity enhancing, insight providing, process streamlining or just fun.

Through this blog post I want to get the creative juices flowing so here´s a bunch of raw ideas for Openbravo Workspace Widgets. Leave your comments below the images.

I am very excited to learn what you will come up with. Start building widgets now or first share your ideas here.

In a few days I will explain how to create a simple widget. [ update: here it is ]